his snippet should do it. If you are denying you may want to do this in the recipient ACL after you accept postmaster and abuse addresses. Watch which servers you reject, as some legitimate senders (airlines, banks, governments) have broken rDNS on their automated senders.

Verify reverse DNS lookup of the sender's host.

deny
message Reverse DNS verification failed
!verify = reverse_host_lookup
!hosts = ${if exists{CONFDIR/local_broken_dns_whitelist}\
{CONFDIR/local_broken_dns_whitelist} {}}

I find a lot of spambots give up quickly if they don't get a connection banner quickly enough. Including the following in a connect ACL may help. Disabling pipelining catches a number of spambots that don't behave well. If the delay is too long (over 30s) some legitimate servers will also give up.

Verify reverse DNS lookup of the sender's host.

Disable piplining and delay on failure.

warn
!hosts = ${if exists{CONFDIR/local_broken_dns_whitelist}\
{CONFDIR/local_broken_dns_whitelist} {}}
!verify = reverse_host_lookup
control = no_pipelining
delay = 10s

Samstagfrüh haben die Kliniken der Oberösterreichischen Gesundheitsholding (OÖG) mit einem Ausfall der IT-Systeme zu kämpfen gehabt. Nach zwei Stunden konnte der Fehler behoben werden.

origin story

Die SPÖ muss nämlich von Grund auf beginnen, eine eigene Medienmacht zu konstruieren, sonst geht sie unter. Diese Kombination aus Kalinismus und Dilettantismus ist unerträglich und führt zu ihrem Untergang.

Vielleicht, füge ich heute hinzu, sollte sie Rudi Fussi zum Kommunikationschef und zum Mitverantwortlichen dieses Prozesses machen, nach Erteilung einiger obligatorischer Backpfeifen (das erste meine ich ernst, das zweite nicht). Seine „Bewerbungsrede“ kam vielleicht zur Unzeit, aber sie war in weiten Teilen hervorragend. Und was wäre dafür keine Unzeit, fragte er, nicht ohne Berechtigung? Wer so reden (und politisch denken) kann, den schickt man nicht in die Wüste. Außer man ist ein Kamel oder ein Vollbluthengst. Also her mit Fussi! Babler soll Parteichef bleiben. Der Neustart, den Fussi fordert, ist so oder so notwendig.

Die SPÖ sollte sich außerdem schleunigst mit allen kurzschließen, die eine andere europäische Politik fordern und zu formulieren beginnen, um der fatalen Macht der Tech-Konzerne Einhalt zu bieten, die bekanntlich die Grundlagen der Demokratie gefährden, den freien Diskurs. Auch dazu demnächst mehr.

Getting mugged? Just say no

Your robber legally cannot take any of your possessions without your consent.

This is how some people expect us to react when an armed police officer asks us for our phone in the middle of the street. Sure, I'll take out my constitution and read my rights right now.

OK, if you have lots of Twitter embeds in your website, I've written an easy(ish) way to replace them with static images & alt text.

https://github.com/edent/Tweet2Img

Run:
python tweet2img.py 1234

And you'll get a ready-to-paste piece of HTML with a data-encoded image.

<a href="https:/ /twitter.com/edent/status/123"><img src="data:image/webp;base64,Ukl..." width="550" height="439" alt="text from tweet."/></a>

It also saves the WebP and alt text if you need them.

Don Estridge broke all
of Big Blue's rules to
create the home computer.
The company would
never forgive him for it.

Jahrelang wurden linke Aktivist*innen nicht darüber benachrichtigt, dass der ehemalige Verfassungsschutzagent Egisto Ott ihre Daten illegal abgefragt hat. Nun haben sie Post erhalten.

Well, today I learned that if you add the Ethernet header – 36 bytes – then an MTU of 1500 plus that header is 1536 bytes, which is 12288 bits, which takes 2^12 microseconds to transmit at 3Mb/second, and because the Xerox Alto computer for which Ethernet was invented had an internal data path that ran at 3Mhz, then you could just write the bits into the Alto’s memory at the precise speed at which they arrived, saving the very-expensive-then cost of extra silicon for an interface or any buffering hardware.

Begonnen hat der Trend zum personellen Kahlschlag vor mehr als einem Jahr bei den Tech-Giganten in den USA. Dort dürfen, im Gegensatz zu den meisten europäischen Ländern, Angestellte ohne Angabe von Gründen fristlos entlassen werden. Um Investoren seines Meta-Konzerns ob der unsicheren globalen Wirtschaftslage zufriedenzustellen, rief Mark Zuckerberg 2023 zum "Jahr der Effizienz" aus. Gemeint war damit vor allem der Abbau von zehntausenden Stellen. Insgesamt rund ein Drittel der Belegschaft musste gehen. Auch andere Tech-Riesen wie Amazon, Google und Microsoft setzten im Verlauf des Vorjahres zehntausende Angestellte vor die Türe.

Earlier jobs for women with computer:
Locherin - femal keypunch operator
a trainingbook.

For decades, robots.txt governed the behavior of web crawlers. But as unscrupulous AI companies seek out more and more data, the basic social contract of the web is falling apart.

It is unfortunate that people dealing with computers often have little interest in the
history of their subject. As a result, many concepts and ideas are propagated and
advertised as being new, which existed decades ago, perhaps under a different
terminology. I believe it worth while to occasionally spend some time to consider the
past and to investigate how terms and concepts originated.

In July 2004 I found myself sitting alone in the dark, on the enclosed deck of a ferry boat oozing between fog-shrouded islands of the Alaskan coast. The scenery was haunting, but after the first three hours, I decided to occupy myself by finally reading Neal Stephenson's essay about the command-line. Halfway through it I began crossing things out, and scribbling comments in the margin. The essay was five years old, and in dire need of a fresh perspective.

Months later, I learned that Stephenson himself was dissatisfied with the essay. He wrote that it, "is now badly obsolete and probably needs a thorough revision." An "Ask Slashdot" poll quoted him as saying, "I keep meaning to update it, but if I'm honest with myself, I have to say this is unlikely."

Though I have fleshed out my original comments into longer, more structured pieces, it is not my intention to replace or revise Neal Stephenson's original writing. His original essay is a much more cohesive and entertaining read than my notes are. (He is a Writer, after all. I consider myself a code-monkey by comparison.) In fact, my notes do not hold together unless they use the original essay as a framework, and that's why his entire essay is reproduced here, with my comments color-coded. And yes, I have sought and obtained permission from Neal to do this.

The problem is that very few people are interested in learning COBOL these days. Coding it is cumbersome, it reads like an English lesson (too much typing), the coding format is meticulous and inflexible, and it takes far longer to compile than its competitors. And since nobody's learning it anymore, programmers who can work with and maintain all that code are a increasingly hard to find. Many of these "COBOL cowboys" are aging out of the workforce, and replacements are in short supply.

IBM’s approach is fairly straightforward: Rather than relying exclusively on a limited pool of human programmers to solve the problem, it built a generative AI-powered code assistant (watsonx) that helps convert all that dusty old COBOL code to a more modern language, thereby saving coders countless hours of reprogramming. In extremely simplified terms, the process is similar to feeding an essay written in English into ChatGPT and asking it to translate certain paragraphs into Esperanto. It allows programmers to take a chunk of COBOL and enlist watsonx to transform it into Java.

Gartner Distinguished Vice President and Analyst, Arun Chandrasekara is also skeptical because “IBM has no case studies, at this time, to validate its claims,” he says.

DNS-Dienste wie Quad9 übersetzen die Namen von Internet-Seiten in numerische IP-Adressen. Damit können Nutzer:innen die gewünschten Inhalte abrufen, ohne sich kryptische Zahlenfolgen merken zu müssen – das können Computer wie die von Quad9 viel besser. Das erstinstanzliche Landgericht sah den Anbieter daher als „Täter“, er spiele „eine zentrale Rolle bei der Rechtsverletzung“, wenn er nicht eine solche Sperre einrichtet. Eine Sperre ist in der Regel jedoch nur für die gesamte Site umsetzbar. Es wird also nicht nur der rechtsverletzende Inhalt gesperrt, sondern viele andere auch.
Kein Täter, kein Störer

Nicht nur der Einstufung von Quad9 als Täter erteilte das Dresdner Gericht eine Absage, auch die Einstufung als sogenannter Störer teilt es nicht.

Stanford economist Nick Bloom this week went so far as to declare the death of "return to the office" – a campaign backed by those with real-estate commitments, commercial landlords, and cities deprived of labor force spending to undo the pandemic-driven pragmatism of working from home.

QEMU Advent Calendar is back!

Each day will bring something interesting to run in emulation.